


On the Seas of Another World

by Raaj



Category: Bravely Default (Video Game) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, References to Addiction, a hopeful ending though, along the veins of ch 7 in tone, but it's AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 10:36:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10462965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raaj/pseuds/Raaj
Summary: After Barbarossa takes her (quite begrudgingly) aboard his ship, Mephilia vents her frustrations in a journal.  But after a few days, she realizes just how vast a favor he's done her.





	

**??, EC 17**

> I woke up today. Shouldn’t have.
> 
> That miserable man is too soft. Not even fit to be called captain. I told him so. Told him what a failure he is. Years on the sea, and still no closer to finding Susano-o. How disappointed Suleiman would be in him. It was pathetic. He simply sat there like a dull lump. Didn’t even try to defend himself. All he’d say was “You can carp at me all you want, girl, I’ll not fight”… How weak. How boring. It was more fun trying to smash his rotting ship against the cliffside of the garden with Ziusudra’s Sin and Girtablulu. I’ll be sure to send this vessel to the bottom of the ocean as soon as I’ve stepped off it.
> 
> I long to return to the gardens… to my delightful work of tearing those fairies apart. I already miss the scent in the air when their wings are torn. Barbarossa, the miserable wretch, doesn’t understand. He looked shaken when I told him about it. He _did_ ask what I had been doing there. Were it possible, I’d almost like to take him back with me… have him inhale that heady scent. Maybe it would bring out a more interesting side to this coward. He’d _nearly_ been bloodthirsty when he’d finally managed to scale the cliffside, but no, no, he was still too weak to use his axe on me.
> 
> …I’m going to stop here for now.
> 
> This decrepit ship is making me sick.

  
**?? EC 17**

> Still sick. I thought I had just lost my sea legs, but the nausea and aches have only gotten worse through the days. How can that pirate live on this damned ship? And he claims it’s the gardens that have made me sick! I could see clearly when I was in the gardens. See the beasts people are. I could even see the other realms more fully, knowing just how insignificant ours is. That’s why it didn’t matter who died. They’re all disgusting. I loved to expose their ugliness on every level. But now, I…
> 
> …I can’t write any more. My head hurts. Just let me back to the gardens…let me shred those wings and see their last glow…
> 
> My head…

  
_[undated]_

> What have I done?
> 
> What have I done?
> 
> I didn’t
> 
> those girls
> 
> there were so many girls
> 
> all they wanted was a silly pin and I
> 
> tricked them
> 
> killed them
> 
> made them kill each other
> 
> my sisters will never forgive me
> 
> the cliffside. that’s why I was at the cliffside, I knew, I must have known, I only needed a moment of clarity and I could have ended it all
> 
> I have to go to the cliffside
> 
> ~~Suleiman, forgive me–let me look on your face once more before I am damned~~

  
**1/20, EC 17**

> …I tried to end my life by jumping off the ship.
> 
> Obviously, I didn’t succeed.
> 
> Two of Barbarossa’s shipmates held me back even as their decayed bones groaned at my struggling. They stood as firm as men without living flesh can and yelled about having a walker. I wouldn’t even have been their first… I forget how harsh seafaring can be sometimes. Suleiman had only told me the better parts, to keep me from worry. Liar. If only I’d known how dangerous it was, I would never have let you go…
> 
> As for my pitiful attempt, once Barbarossa came and scooped me up, it was pointless to keep fighting. I still tried. I told him he didn’t know what he was doing and, more importantly, didn’t know what I had done. My memory of the days in the garden are a nightmare–I still don’t entirely know what is real or imagined–but I told him every single monstrous thing I could remember doing in a bid to make him let me go, if not throw me over himself.
> 
> He didn’t. Instead, he took me down to the galley and starting making tea. I hate tea. But I hated more the way he moved about the galley, puttering about to pour us both cups and spiking them with rum as if this were nothing more than ordinary routine. I refused to drink his tea, or talk to him, or even look at him until he admitted that the day he found me, he had nearly killed me. After he’d knocked me out, he’d reached for his axe–raised it up–had it not been for his crew shouting at him to stop, I would have never woken up a week ago.
> 
> He hadn’t been strong enough to resist the effects from the fairies’ wings either, he told me. He’d only been saved by the fact that the undead could not be affected by it. And I knew he meant that word, ‘saved’, because I could see the shame in his hunched shoulders and hear it in in his voice as he described that moment. Barbarossa was best friends with Suleiman, and even if he’s nothing to show for it yet, he’s kept looking for Susano-o to fulfill the promise my love made… Had he killed me, he would never have forgiven himself.
> 
> …I forgot, somehow, that Suleiman was not the only man who could be kind and soft without being weak. There’s a reason why they were friends. Barbarossa is like Einheria–noble through and through, annoyingly so until you learn to accept some people are simply better (and even then, it’s still infuriating). …He wants to take me to his commander, Nobutsuna Kamiizumi. Einheria’s old teacher. He thinks the swordmaster might be able to help me navigate any longterm effects from being in the gardens, and that he’d also be keen to know about the tactics Fiore DeRosa’s chosen to use in Florem. …I suppose I’ll let him take me to Eisenberg. I don’t know that I deserve to 'recover’ from a madness I lost myself in, but I can’t harm myself on Suleiman’s–Barbarossa’s ship. He’s lost too many people…to the sickness that swept over the ship, to the suicides that claimed those in despair from having lost their friends…there’s no telling how many times he made spiked tea for two after stopping someone, and how many other times he had to pronounce another one lost.
> 
> So it’s to Eisenberg. We’ll see what Swordmaster Kamiizumi makes of me. I suppose my sisters will find out all that I’ve done. I can only hope that they–

  
**1/21, EC 17**

> That oaf didn’t know my sisters were also stationed in Florem, and I’ve been so sick this last week I haven’t been thinking straight! Dear spirits, I pray my sisters are all right. I remember Einheria visiting me at times, and I think she has escaped the worst. She seemed put off by my behavior, which considering how I have been is a good sign for her being of sound mind–but Artemia! Artemia, we’ve left you in the wilds again, and with monsters far worse than Frostis.
> 
> I must go to Artemia first. We’re changing course. The swordmaster will hear about what’s happened in time–but if either of my sisters have been affected like me, the red mage will face my judgment first.


End file.
